Imperfect Collective at Signal Arts Centre

I greatly enjoyed Imperfect Collective’s recent show Picking Up the Pieces at Signal Arts Centre in Bray. It was probably one of the best and most interesting exhibitions I have seen at Signal! There’s a lot here to unpack – memory, damage & repair, violence, frustration, desperation, perhaps even reconciliation.

The noise of crashing plates from the video was the first thing I noticed, but since the video was already in progress I decided to have a look around the gallery first, before returning to watch it in full. It was a twenty minute long video on a loop. Most of the exhibition was sculptural, with the exception of three self-portraits of the three women who make up the collective: Cathy O'Reilly Hayes, Darina Meagher and Ann Marie Webb.

I looked around at the various works of various awkward shapes on various plinths. All the dishes are of that type that one associates with propriety. I am familiar with the Japanese concept of kintsugi, yet the crockery is glued together carelessly and the glue painted over with gold to represent the idea of kintsugi while not actually being kintsugi (which is far more precise and elegant).

When I get back around to watching the video, I realise that it provides the key to the work. The video is shot in a pool without water so the sound kind of echoes. Three pairs of hands conscientiously place dishes on a table. At first it seems they are setting a table, but no, they continue stacking the dishes precariously. A large, covered, silver but tarnished, roasting dish is placed in the centre of the table and the hands begin polishing. They are not careful at all with the task and the dishes find their way to the pool floor. The noise begins. Eventually high-heeled shoes are thrown at the table of dishes and everything is broken. The shoes remain on the table. Restrictive high heeled shoes have never been part of my wardrobe so throwing them at the table does not represent a rebellion of any sort for me. But I can sort of understand the point (and yes, the high heels are also pointed!).

The press release for the exhibition talks about the societal pressure to avoid failure but I somehow seemed to have missed this concept in the viewing and instead see it entirely as a feminist act of rebellion against upbringing and propriety. There is carelessness in putting back together of the dishes - perhaps there may be some regret in breaking them but the restoration is cursory: they are no longer useful as dishes. The smaller pieces too, the plaster encased shoes kind of holding repaired dishes, no longer serve any shoe-like function. They are white. They are ghosts. 

Pat Moran

While going through the multitude of items in the roof portfolios, I came across the poster for my friend Pat Moran’s 1988 exhibition at Temple Bar Gallery & Studios in Dublin (where I held my first solo exhibtion the following year).

It was a great loss to his many friends and Ireland’s art world when Pat died suddenly in 1992, just a week after I had last laughed with him. I think I have a letter from Pat from 1989, and also the birthday card he made for me. 

On the other side of the painting he included the dedication and a postcard he found. He told me this postcard reminded him of the studio I had in The Tyrone Guthrie Centre, which was full of large dolphins, flowers and star cutouts that I drew and stuck to the studio walls. When Pat visited my studio there, he called it the "play room".

I googled Pat expecting to find some images of his work but was surprised not to find anything online. However, there was a Gandon Editions catalogue from a retrospective held at The Crawford Gallery, Cork in 2003 available and I promptly ordered it from Kenny's Bookshop in Galway. A few days later I was perusing the catalogue.

I particularly liked his Self Portrait with Isabella Rossellini and the look of surprise on Pat's face in the painting. 

I thought I would include  here a couple of  images of some paintings of The Tyrone Guthrie Centre at Annaghmakerrig, which was where Pat & I first met in the spring of 1989.

Mary-Ruth Walsh at Rathfarnham Castle

I wanted to make sure I got to Mary-Ruth Walsh's exhibition at Rathfarnham Castle exhibition, Strangely Familiar Shades of Gray II, before it closed. Especially as I've been seeing information about Walsh's sister exhibition, Skin Deep, which was in Highlanes Gallery,  Drogheda, Limerick City Gallery of Art, and most recently at Wexford Arts Centre.The gorgeous accompanying book of the same name was created through collaboration between Walsh and Folded Leaf (aka Eílís Murphy). In the Entrance Hall there is an overview concept video where Walsh speaks about this body of work (including Skin Deep) and its relation to Eileen Gray's architectural work. Walsh made plaster casts from various packaging materials and then created the haunting cyanotype prints.

Imagine my delight when I saw all the images in cyanotype (my current obsession) in the Salon!

While I know these images are directly related to the plaster casts, they become more like architectural blueprints in both size and quality. The process gives the images a reflective, luminous quality which is ghostly.

This is another view of Salon. There are cyanotype prints on the walls and plaster castings on the pristine, specialty light-box display tables. The entire exhibition makes one extremely aware of light and space - perfect for its setting within the architecture of Rathfarnham Castle.

One cast shared a light table with a clear sphere that reflected the surrounding cyanotypes in miniature.

This is another image of that sphere from a different angle - reflecting the room's windows as well as some of the prints on surrounding walls. In the Pistol Room an ethereal video by Walsh compared Eileen Gray's designed house in France (known as E1027) to the inside of a camera. For me the reflective sphere and this video corresponded through time and space. And light, perhaps.

Although I glimpsed this piece in the Dining Room from the Entrance Hall when I came in, Covid guidelines necessitated following the arrow directions and seeing the work in the Salon first. However, for me, this was a wonderful way to end the show (there was one more cyanotype with matching pink paint on it, but the glass frame made it impossible to photograph adequately). This screen, entitled Aprés Eileen Gray, is a scaled replica of one of Gray's screens. I first came across Gray on an art school trip to NYC, where an exhibition of her designs, including several screens, were on display at The Met. I have been enamoured by her work since, so it was wonderful to see Walsh's homage. I thought this particular piece, which had a strong influence on the design of the book Skin Deep, was in the sister exhibition, so I was excited to see it from the corner of my eye on arrival and then to see it commanding the room at the end of the exhibition.

Then & Now: Janet Mullarney at IMMA

A few weeks ago I was delighted to see the exhibition of sculptural work by Janet Mullarney in the hallowed halls of IMMA. Mullarney was one of the first contemporary Irish artists that really impressed me when I had seen an exhibition of hers at the Project Art Centre about 30 years ago!

Mullarney's figurative work straddles that precarious space between dream and reality, fact and fiction - a space close to my own heart.

I concur with IMMA's description of the exhibition: "Although the works presented are diverse in scale, form and materials, they clearly belong to the distinctive world of Mullarney's imagination. Her underlying concerns with the strangeness, darkness and fragility of the human condition also form a connecting thread." IMMA website

Looking at the pictures and thinking about Mullarney's work now, I see a positive affinity with the work of Louise Bourgeois, another artist that I admire.

Mullarney comes from a classically trained background (Florence, Italy) and divides her time between studios in Ireland and Italy. The exhibition brings together old and new work, though I was surprised NOT to see any of the work I remembered from that early Dublin show that had so impressed me. The exhibition runs till October 13 2019.